Readers of this column will not be surprised that Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States.

Not because he is a paragon of virtue or the ideal role model for our children, but because, as we have said for some time, he identified the issues that matter to the American people. In particular, he addressed the devastation of the working class through trade agreements and tax policies that drove U.S. companies abroad.

And because Hillary Clinton was a fatally flawed candidate foisted on the American people by a Democratic Party leadership out of touch with voters.

The insurgent campaigns of Trump and Bernie Sanders, which together registered nearly twice as many votes as establishment candidate Clinton in the primaries, sent an unmistakable signal that voters want fundamental change in the way our country is run.

Trump confounded the pollsters and the pundits — and the party leadership — in winning the Republican nomination, and confounded them again in winning the Electoral College vote for president.

What Donald Trump's Presidency Could Mean for Taxes

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President-elect Donald Trump has promised big tax cuts for individuals and businesses, and with a Republican-controlled Congress, he is likely to implement many of his policies. WSJ's Shelby Holliday explains. Photo: Getty

Boohoo for all the people who thought Trump was an existential threat to democracy, that his deep-seated neuroses and personality flaws disqualified him for the presidency. A majority of American voters, frustrated out of their minds with the political elite, thought otherwise.

The polls undercounted his support, the pundits missed the point, the mainstream media sealed their own doom in their blind support for Clinton, and the people elected Trump to change the direction of the country.

The Clintons’ flagrant abuse of power, the overwhelming stench of corruption seeping out of Washington, and the hope of real change from a genuine outsider drove American voters to give a decisive mandate to Donald Trump as an overdue agent of change.

Not even the prospect of electing the first woman president — a dream so fervently hoped for by a generation of feminists — could overcome the real issues in this campaign: the need to keep the American dream alive, and, yes, to make America great again.

Early exit polls indicated that the top priority for voters was a strong leader. However mystifyingly high the approval ratings for President Barack Obama are, no one would rank the champion of leading from behind as a strong leader.

Nor could they back a Clinton who never could decide on an overriding vision of why she was running for president after her inconsequential record as senator and secretary of state. Qualified, yes; able, not so much.

Ultimately, her dissembling about the use of a private email server, coming on top of a long history of scandal and dissimulation, made Hillary Clinton unacceptable to a wide swath of voters. In retrospect, her campaign was over before it started with her disastrous press conference in March of last year, where virtually everything she said about her decision to use a private server turned out to be untrue.

You can’t blame James Comey for this. Whether or not the FBI is investigating possible violations of the law with the private server, or when the director chooses to talk to Congress about it, is secondary to the fact that Clinton set up the server and misled the public about it.

The stunning upset is being labeled a repudiation of the establishment, and it is certainly that. It is a repudiation of the establishment candidate, Clinton, and the wealthy who bankrolled her campaign. But it is also a repudiation of the Republican Party leadership, which offered only skittish and intermittent support for the nominee selected by Republican voters.

It is a devastating indictment of the Democratic Party, which not only lost the White House but failed in its effort to recapture either house of Congress. The machinations of Debbie Wasserman Schultz to block Bernie Sanders’s chances of winning the nomination, and those of Donna Brazile to make sure her candidate looked good in the debates backfired badly once they were exposed.

And it is a repudiation of the mainstream media. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said so tellingly at one point, it’s not sure whether any of them will still have jobs if Trump wins the election. She seemed to think a President Trump would suppress the media, but it will be market forces that send many anchors and newspaper editors packing.

All those people who were waiting for Trump to “pivot” and start acting presidential finally got it in the subdued and Twitter-free candidate who went on a marathon drive in the final two weeks of the campaign to win the battleground states and to turn seemingly blue states into battlegrounds.

The pivot to presidential culminated in his victory speech early this morning, when he made the traditional appeal for unity and pledged to be a president of all the people. At some point, Clinton will emerge to make the concession she so smugly declared is the very essence of our democracy when she thought it would be Trump doing the conceding.

Ultimately it came down to the conundrum, as expressed by one conservative commentator, that the press took Trump literally, but not seriously, while voters took him seriously, but not literally.

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